FWIW I don't think any option is a good idea, I think it's a case of choosing the least bad idea.
On one hand we can bomb Syria and hopefully send a message that the benefits of chemical weapons usage (clearing an area of people without damaging infrastructure) is outweighed by the cost of international response but with the risk that this will just make Assad go berserk and start firing into Jordan, Turkey and Israel.
On the other hand we have the option of doing nothing with the risk that chemical weapon usage is deemed acceptable so that even more is used. The problem with CW usage is that although it doesn't necessarily cause more casualties than conventional weapons it does remove the cost of having to rebuild after. It's dangerously effective for for example, ethnic cleansing, as you can hit an area with CW, wipe out the inhabitants and then just send in a new population a couple of weeks later to take all their stuff and live in their homes. Right now even if Assad wins the cost is high because he'll be destroying his major cities and his country will become poorer so at some point there's an incentive for him to not destroy everything in an effort to kill everyone, but with CWs? There's no incentive not to just kill absolutely everyone who opposes him and even those caught in the middle who don't. There's also a danger that other regimes then try the same approach on their populace.
It's all bad either way so although I'm leaning towards bombing Syria as the least bad option I think even in hindsight it'll look bad, but will it look as bad in hindsight as doing nothing would have if we'd done nothing instead? That's ultimately the question we have to ask.
Contrast this to other recent actions and I think Iraq is way worse in hindsight than doing nothing would've been in hindsight. I think Afghanistan however may be just a little bit better (even though it's still bad) in hindsight than leaving the Taliban in may have been - it's easy to forget how brutal that regime was when we focus only on the more recent fuckup of an invasion we made.
It's called on NATO support which is kind of the point.
"What did the UN do about that?"
Nothing because it's politically paralysed.
"You're right - they can ask for our assistance. Which would imply that they are leading the charge and not us. Why is it our responsibility to lead the charge?"
I suspect you're tainted by your media, because your media reports on your governments actions making you believe it's just your government taking the lead. British media is prominent in reporting how it's the UK that's taken this to the UN for authorisation and I'm sure French media is reporting the steps France is taking. Turkish media will be doing the same. The arab league has similarly made it's comments and it's push. The lead on this is multinational in nature.
It's not as if you always lead the charge either, look at Libya, French warplanes with British following had to intervene to stop a massacre in Benghazi when Obama was still stuttering away with his pants down and no idea what to do or say. The same applies to Malia where the French took the lead.
I really wish you'd just stop lying and pretending I've said things I haven't. It's quite stupid, i.e.:
"As mentioned previously, this is intentioned as the US Media is painting them as innocent victims with no way of using Chemical weapons. You do the same, even to the point of claiming that they can't deliver CWs."
I haven't said they can't deliver CWs. It's quite obvious they're capable of delivering standard artillery and mortar rounds with a chemical payload. What I have said is there's no evidence that they're capable of delivering 1 and a half metre long munitions, let alone from the middle of government held territory. That's quite a contrast to what you're saying I've said.
"I do like however, that you dropped the UN findings in March from your argument because those facts hurt your belief that it must be Assad using CWs. How considerate of you to be so selective with facts."
Where have I dropped this exactly? I asked you to provide a source. You haven't done this, so should I assume you just made it up or are you going to actually provide evidence for your assertion? Asking someone to back up their claim with evidence isn't dropping something, it's asking them to prove their point, if you believe your point is correct the only logical conclusion I can make from you attempting to avoid proving it with a source is that you're simply lying.
"While this may be _YOUR_ opinion, this is not the opinion of US foreign policy or any recent administration."
Really? It's my opinion that nukes are deterrents and get EOL'd before use? Since World War II can you point to use of nuclear WMDs in a military conflict because I and the rest of the world would love to hear about it.
"We threaten Iran because they are trying to gain nuclear capabilities under the assumption that they will be nuking us and our allies."
That's because there's always a danger that just because current nuclear arsenals are a deterrent that not everyone will view them that way. It's not really rocket science to be able to understand this. The whole point in limiting nuclear arsenals is precisely to ensure they remain a deterrent and nothing else.
"Assad has not attacked UN forces, and the FSA has."
Yes he has, he's also fired artillery, mortar shells and bullets into Turkey killing Turkish civilians in their own homes. This is why I'm suspicious of your one-sidedness as you're either brutally uninformed on the issue or intentionally presenting a very biased case. This is also why I said it's irrelevant what the FSA has done outside the chemical issue because for every rebel wrongdoing you can point to many of the same type and on a larger scale carried out by the regime. It's pointless and irrelevant to the chemical question unless you're trying to poison the well.
"You do realize that the US has been monitoring every CW depot in Syria for over a year correct? So what you are claiming is twisted reasoning. There would, and should be, two parts to the inspection. 1) investigating the target area, and 2) investigating CW housing facilities for recent activity."
What makes you think this isn't the reason the US is certain Assad is responsible? Why are you assuming the US knows about every chemical facility? It's not like with Pakistan a US ally that shares all it's nuclear facility information with the US, Syria doesn't do that, the US knowledge of chemical facilities is based on intel and intel can be wrong and miss things.
"So killing thousands of civilians is the answer to someone killing a few hundred?"
I disagree but you seem to think so given that you're defending the Assad regime that has done exactly that which is a little odd. I don't even know what killing of thousands of civilians you're referring to. If there's any strike it should be against purely military targets, if there's any risk of this going wrong then the US shouldn't launch the strike. I don't agree with the US doctrine of fire now and worry about civilian casualties later, I prefer the Anglo-French
He seems to be pretty reasoned and balanced in his reporting too which is a refreshing change.
"There's no special equipment necessary for this - it's just regular artillery shells with a different filling. Some of them can be launched from mortars, even. It's all really low tech."
The imaged munitions are just too large to be fired from a mortar, they're around 1 and a half metres in length at least, possibly 2, that's a sizeable round requiring a substantial artillery piece at minimum.
"Did rebels call out for a ceasefire?"
Is there any reason to think the rebels wouldn't want investigators in ASAP to validate their claims? Has Assad even suggested that was the reason the inspectors couldn't go in? Assad was completely silent on the issue and gave no such excuse, most likely because he knew the rebels would rapidly respond with such an offer of safe passage for the inspectors, because that's what the rebels were calling for.
"Assuming a "sniper" here means a guy with an SVD, he could be anywhere within 700 meters."
700 metres and still get multiple pot shots on the tyres and engine? Seems unlikely.
I don't disagree with you that there are multiple players involved all with different agendas and few agreeing, but that doesn't change the fact that Assad still seems the most likely culprit given the evidence available. The extremists would find it just as hard to get a massive artillery piece into government held territory and launch multiple such rounds unchallenged and undetected. It seems silly to suggest that Assad's forces doing this doesn't make sense - it doesn't make sense that Assad would allow his forces to fire into Turkey and risk getting a major military power that was a former ally to turn on him, it doesn't make sense that he'd attack peaceful protests just as the likes of Gaddafi did turning them from protestors into rebels. It didn't make sense for Japan to pull the US into World War II either but that's the problem with saying it doesn't make sense - any assumption that anything a dictatorial regime does should make sense is a false assumption. Dictators and those under them aren't rational and that's what makes them so dangerous.
I'm not calling for military action at least until the UN has time to play out it's game and even then it's questionable as to what action should be taken because it's so messy but I do think the evidence is pretty strongly tilted against Assad on this.
"The obvious reason to show this is to break the common illusion that the FSA are innocent victims in the use of chemical weapons."
But that's not the debate is it? Most people here are smart enough to know that neither side is the good guy, the debate is about whether action should occur to limit the impact of chemical weapons usage against civilians by the Assad regime. Other wrongdoing by either side is pretty much irrelevant to that. That's why your viewpoint comes across as one-sided, because you're painting the FSA as bad with all sorts of irrelevancies without giving the regime the same treatment before addressing the underlying issue - talk about poisoning the well.
"Email verification is not just a visual inspection of messages."
Right but those "experts" don't have access to anything else whatsoever other than the messages, and perhaps not even that - seemingly just screenshots of said messages. They don't have access to the mailservers and interim router logs so it's pointless to pretend they're doing anything other than just looking at message content.
Your comparison to Manning et. al. is hence irrelevant because the US military does have access to all their own logs.
"More rubbish! The UN reports are public knowledge."
Provide a source then as I've not seen anything to suggest such reports exist other than a news story from a Russian propaganda outlet that the Russians handed this information to the Americans at the UN which is not the same as the UN finding this independently.
"A logical step in obtaining a weapon is for it's later use."
Right, and that's why we have nukes, because we're going to actually use them? Most WMDs are EOL'd without ever being used as they're first and foremost a deterrent or bargaining chip.
"I think the question alone shows that you are extremely biased."
Oh stop being a fucking idiot. I never said anywhere it was okay for the US to assume one group is acquiring for use and another is not, you just completely fabricated that whole concept in your mind. It's quite possible for someone like me to think the US was in the wrong on Iraq but right in Syria - you may be inept at understanding the world is full of shades of grey but I'm perfectly capable of avoiding that world is only black/white kind of retardation people like you seem to suffer. It's quite possible for both the US and Assad to be in the wrong on some things, and right on other things you know? Because I believe Assad is almost certainly in the wrong here doesn't mean I somehow believe the US has always been in the right about everything ever. Hell, even though I think Assad is most likely in the wrong here, I'm still not even convinced the US is going about things the right way.
"Actually there are numerous reports and videos of the FSA using artillery based chemical weapons. Since those are not verifiable by credible sources I did not list them."
Not of the type that was used in this particular chemical strike. The Brown Moses blog has a reasonable write up and analysis of the munitions in question. Most rebel weaponry has been of the scale of your average artillery shell, the munitions in this case were something very different.
"There is no evidence that Assad shot at inspectors. Assad has no history of doing so, but the FSA on the other hand has. The FSA has also kidnapped UN peace keepers, targeted civilians (IED, public executions, etc...). To claim that this must have been Assad is almost laughable."
You're both speculating and going off on a wild tangent again - Assad's forces have also committed mass atrocities and kidnappings including summary executions of entire families and mass rape but what's the relevance here unless you're trying to taint the discussion. If the rebels fired at the UN convoy then why? The sooner the convoy can get there the sooner the rebels can try and have their claim validated, whilst Assad had already delayed the inspectors by about a week. The rebels have neither incentive nor reason to do anyt
Your post is an example of confirmation bias, you're only seeing what you want to see. The fact is the situation is far less straightforward than your post implies:
"2. December, FSA rebels posted Youtube videos of home made chemical agents killing rabbits."
Can't say I've ever heard about this but what exactly does it prove? Simply that some rebels were experimenting with chemical weapons along with all the other home made weapons they've created? Great, but it's no proof of usage in actual combat or even effectiveness of chemicals against humans.
"3. December, German hacker broke into a UK military contractors email and found messages stating roughly the US and UK are paying enormous funds for us to sneak CWs into Syria, use a CW shell from Libya of Russian make similar to what Assad would have, and blow it up. Experts have determined that the emails look to be legit."
I've encountered this before though afaik it was a Malaysian hacker not that it makes a difference either way. I don't think "experts" can determine anything much, an e-mail is so trivially possible to make look legit it's meaningless, all they can really say is that there were no mistakes made in making it look legit, but seeing as a simple checklist is enough to avoid that then I don't know that it matters. Even taking the assumption that it was legit then it's not a smoking gun because it provides no verifiable evidence that anything concrete ever came of it.
"4. February chemical weapons were claimed to be used. The UN determined in March that it was the FSA using these weapons. Interestingly, the US claims contrary to the UN without evidence. Of course the war drum banging was minimized by media, perhaps too close to the emails suggesting false flag?"
This particular comment is painfully one-sided. The UN didn't determine anything. Russia, Assad's close ally made the claim that they had irrefutable proof that the FSA had used chemical weapons in response to evidence provided by the US and others (including independent organisations such as human rights and medical charities) that the Syrian military had used chemical weapons. Effectively it was a he-said she-said, but most definitely wasn't the one-sided no-doubt about it FSA only used chemical weapons scenario you're claiming. At best if reports are all assumed to be true then both sides made small-scale usage of chemical weapons though the problem is the Russian evidence is least credible because it could only come from one source, the Assad regime itself, and was not backed by independent third party sources.
"5. March, Military.com reported that FSA rebels were caught attempting to transport chemical weapons through the Turkish border into Syria."
Again, quite possibly true and a big deal, but transport of weapons isn't equivalent to use of weapons. Just to highlight why this is the case then consider that the Assad regime has been in control of a stockpile of chemical weapons for decades and it's pretty clear that up until recently that demonstrates no evidence that they've used them. I guess at best your point is an attempt to build the case that they had access to them so they could potentially have used them.
"8/20 videos start being uploaded to Youtube showing victims of CWs. Date stamps put many of these videos ahead of the reported attack by at least 12 hours."
This has firmly been debunked as idiots getting confused by time zones:
I don't think so. Tunisia was different because it was an uprising that actually worked, in Iran it was suppressed. It was seeing an uprising work that triggered the same to happen in the other arab nations as it gave them hope that they could in fact overthrow the dictators in charge.
It's paranoia to say nothing in the world relating to the human environment happens by chance, it's too complex for those involved in politics to reasonably predict or plan for this sort of thing to happen. It's like the people who believe 9/11 was orchestrated by the NSA and the WTC was taken down by explosives - the NSA can't even keep it's own secrets secure so how the fuck would it manage thousands of people from those manning seismometers and getting them to lie about the non-detection of an explosion through to the thousands of security staff who would've seen someone wiring up explosives, through to the rescue workers all of whom would have to be in on the plot for it to be successful.
The idea that things of this scale are controllable in this manner is a joke, if we could predict and control complex systems like this then weather reports would be always accurate, financial markets would maintain perpetual unfaltering growth and perhaps more importantly, there would be no need for war. It's likely that agencies like the CIA stoke the flames in nations like Iran and help fund and support activists and so forth but it takes way more than that to trigger a successful uprising, let alone multiple successful uprisings across a massive region. That can't be planned and controlled.
It was entirely Bush's fuckup but the problem runs through the American mindset. America is far too good at blowing shit up, and not so great at building shit up - you can see this from their overall strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq through to the individual scale of multiple cases where American troops have killed civilians/allies through sheer negligence and the issue has resulted in no punishment.
It's fundamentally a problem of arrogance, a belief that America can do no wrong and ultimately the ugly side of the concept of American exceptionalism. I think you're dead right in that if you don't have a clear plan and clear objectives then you shouldn't go in but I disagree that you couldn't have done a better job. I think it was wrong to go into Iraq in the first place as there really was no genuine justification, but once you had gone in the biggest mistake the US made in failing to rebuild the state was to completely dismantle existing Iraqi institutions, the police and military were just completely disbanded and it took way too long to build up new ones allowing utter anarchy to occur in the meantime which just snowballed out of control as al Qaeda et. al. moved in and the likes of Sadr and friends grew in strength unopposed. The proper solution was to leave them in place and change them - replace the hard liners with moderates and retrain from the top down.
Afghanistan was a different matter, not enough was spent there after the invasion, the US tried to do it on the cheap and it backfired costing way more in the long run. At some points America was spending more in Iraq in a month than it had in about 5 years in Afghanistan. This meant reconstruction again too way too long and the Afghans that supported the invention got fed up of waiting, coupled with lack of care to avoid civilian casualties turned opinion against occupying troops.
I agree Syria is awkward, just like Egypt, and Libya. There's a legitimate question of whether what rises to replace Assad will in any way be better than Assad. Perhaps the best thing that could come out of it all is the destruction of Hezbollah though as it loses it's main financial backer, it's over-the-border arms supplier and a sizeable proportion of it's troops fighting in Syria. Hezbollah has tipped the balance in favour of Assad by joining in, so if a few arms-length cruise missile strikes tip the balance back then I guess it's about just letting them take chunks out of each other until the likes of Hezbollah and the al-Qaeda aligned groups have been battered into irrelevance by each other but what happens then is still anyone's guess.
"Do we punish every country for which a misdeed is perceived?"
No, just particularly defined atrocities.
"And which misdeeds are punishable and which are not?"
Those defined as "crimes against humanity", this category tends to encompass things like massacres, particularly when banned weapons such as chemical and biological. See here for more detail on the category:
"The US has not been attacked. Therefore we do not go to war. The US is not under threat of attack by Syria. Therefore we do not go to war."
Doesn't matter. Turkey has been hit by Syrian weaponry, Turkey is a NATO member, NATO members are obligated to help each other in the face of acts of war, just as Turkey helped you after your tragedy in Afghanistan, you owe it a debt of supporting it when it has faced aggression from Syria. If you don't like it, get out of NATO, but don't come crying if you find yourself not having the overwhelming military support of NATO in a stand off against China or whoever. The US has a large military but it's still small relative to the combined size of NATO forces.
"We did not enter WWII until two years later in 1941, and in that case our fucking military base at pearl harbor was attacked. Get a grip bro."
So you're saying it's better to do what you did then and let millions of foreign civilians die remaining passive until an atrocity is committed against your own civilians and then act losing millions more personnel in a far more complex and out of control war? Rather than act early, save the lives of millions of foreign civilians and prevent any attacks on your own civilians whilst losing less of your own servicemen precisely because you stamped out the problem early? What an odd preference. I'm not sure it's the GP that needs to get a grip.
I'm not much one for war myself (Iraq was stupid. Afghanistan not quite so much but was incredibly poorly executed meaning it ended up stupid) but the rationale being used here by people like yourself is nonsensical, it amounts to "We shouldn't get involved until the problem is so out of control it affects us and causes loss of life to us too". That really is fucking stupid.
"should we talk about the rebels carving out and eating organs again?"
Why do you say "rebels"? One or two rebels did this and you tar the other million or so with the same brush? Pretending they're all the same is stupid and even those who stood behind this guy as their leader when he did it are now shunning him. He has been interviewed as to why he did it and even his closest friends have suggested it wasn't the smartest idea when interviewed too. He wasn't some batshit crazy fundamentalist who eats hearts because of some voodoo belief it'll make him stronger or anything (as is the case with some African combatants over the last few decades), he was an individual in a brutal war trying to scare the living fucking shit out of the opposition with the video. That doesn't make it defensible but it's kind of worlds apart from killing as many as 1000 people, most of whom were civilians using chemical weapons like sarin gas.
"then you have my permission"
Oh well great good dictator, I'm glad then we'll have YOUR permission, because of course you're so god damn important.
"If they aren't attacking other countries"
They've killed Turkish civilians with stray bullets, mortar rounds, artillery shells, and bombs. Intentional or not, that's a clear act of war. They've also had their attack aircraft intrude into Turkish airspace and they've fired upon the Golan Heights which is a UN demilitarised buffer zone in breach of the UN convention that created it. Turkey is a NATO member and part of the NATO agreement is that member states can call on others to assist if they face acts of aggression. I'm not arguing for or against this intervention here but the US is very much implicated in this as a member of NATO just as NATO helped the US in it's war in Afghanistan. Turkey has suffered numerous acts of war from Syria so has every right to insist that the US and other NATO members assist it in striking Syria.
I'm not against your premise that this is a messy complex situation and that getting involved is fraught with risks as a result but your suggestion that this isn't your problem is completely false. You can't call on the help of NATO after your 9/11 tragedy as it suits and then shrug off your responsibilities as a NATO member as not your problem when it doesn't.
But the Cold War was supposedly over so picking a fight over Russia influence isn't the done thing anymore. If however you can pick a fight that gets the Russian's kicked out without making it directly about the Russians then great.
There's also another important geopolitical prize for the West here - the destruction of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is funded by Iran and Syria and has a massive percentage of it's forces in Syria. If Hezbollah loses half it's forces in Syria and Syria itself falls then Hezbollah is basically done, it becomes easy pickings for the anti-Hezbollah forces remaining in Lebanon and can be trivially put down by the Western backed secular Lebanese military. Effectively Lebanon becomes much more free from Syrian/Iranian influence and Israel gets a secure northern border.
There's a lot for the West to gain from all this, Russia loses it's last remaining naval base in the Med, Hezbollah becomes ineffective and loses it's funding and only immediate land path for arms to be passed to it, Lebanon falls almost entirely into the hands of the West and Syrian oil becomes up for grabs.
The West may not be there only because of Russia but it's bound to be one of a number of reasons that makes the West happy to be there.
You were well received in Iraq when you toppled Saddam and Afghanistan after you kicked out the Taliban. You just completely and utterly fucked it up after those points.
I don't know why Americans always point to the UK in an attempt to pretend their country hasn't grossly overstepped the mark. It's pretty clear the US does everything the UK does to its citizens and then some, the only difference being that in the UK it's talked about, reported on and normally debated in parliament but in the US the government just does it and pretend it doesn't. The US has far more local laws against liberty than the UK too such as mandating how much grass you must or musn't have in your own fucking garden and so forth which is stupid. Not to mention half of America's students study under the watch of armed guards half the time now too as a measure resulting from school shootings.
America as being more free than any European country including the UK now is a pretty well established fallacy. These a massive gulf between the freedom Americans think they have and stand for than they actually have and stand for. In contrast the UK knows about the limitations on freedom it suffers but just because it acknowledges them more than America doesn't mean it suffers them more in practice. The UK still allows firearms such as shotguns and hunting rifles with hundreds of thousands still out there (8% of the population opt to own a firearm) whilst America bans kinder eggs. What was that about nanny state?
America needs to wake up and smell the coffee and still trying to use misdirection against other states. About the only additional freedoms Americans have and can point to are the ability to picket funerals shouting "God hates fags" and the ability to own greater firearms that they supposedly need to defend their liberty. Great ideas but how are they working out in practice? Not at all it seems.
The UK may have issues but it at least is a step further on in the process in dealing with them in that they're acknowledged. America is still stuck very much in the denial stage with no sign of breaking out saying it doesn't need to because well, apparently Britain is worse. Apparently.
Yep, a lot of people have a very draconian view that a leader or manager is someone who commands down their views and slaps their underlings into submission.
But a good leader or manager recognises they're there not to command, but to enable their staff to do their jobs. Rarely that might mean giving them a kick up the arse, but mostly being a good leader is about being knowledgeable or knowing where to find knowledge (be it the internet, a training course, or a book) to assist staff who get stuck.
A good leader doesn't need to be nasty or forceful because they have earnt the respect of their staff and in earning the respect of their staff their staff will be happy to do as they ask or know that they can query and discuss any problems they may encounter or have with what is asked. As you say, they know it's not just what the leader says that goes, but about consensus.
And being a good leader is good in itself because you don't have to get annoyed, you don't have to get stressed, you can turn up to work and just peacefully get on with your job because you know your staff will get on with theirs. Shit gets done, targets get hit and bonuses get paid.
"We helped push Mubarak out when it became obvious that he was going to go"
No you didn't, the people of Egypt and their military did. At best America issued a few "strongly worded statements".
"We not only militarily forced Quadaffi out, but we managed to arrange things so that everyone else was *begging* us to do it, so we could come in "reluctantly""
France had launched it's first strikes against Gaddaffi's forces when Obama and Hillary were still fumbling about with indecisiveness as the people of Benghazi were otherwise only hours away from carnage.
You barely even helped. Apart from some initial cruise missiles and some drones in the sky providing surveillance it was an Anglo-French-Qatari affair as it was they who were doing all the bombing runs and all of the rest of the surveillance as well as providing all the on the ground training and delivery of weapons. Of course, the people who really did the bulk of the work though were the rebels themselves though.
"You tell me what else changed in the last 8 months to cause this? "
So there you have it, nothing has changed and that's the point. This is Obama's modus-operandi. The press and other leaders call it "patient and considered" but in reality he's indecisive and fumbling. There are any numbers of occasions where if he was a strong leader he'd have been more decisive and stood up for his point but instead just stayed quiet - the battles in Syria have been going on over 2 years and he still doesn't know what he's doing and the worst part? He finally decided to arm the rebels only after the extremist groups had gained loads of power because no one else was coming to help. Had he decided to arm the rebels a year or 18 months ago then the moderates would've been in a far stronger position than they are now. His fumbling only made the situation worse - he should've armed early, or made a commitment not to intervene full stop. He did neither and created a shit storm as he did nothing about chemical weapon attacks something he previously called a "red line" - we know one thing, Obama's red-lines are probably the least scary thing on the planet.
I'm not a fan of the other extreme - the Bush-Cheney hot-headed kill everything ideology but dawdling about without making a decision is entirely about Obama not Kerry or Clinton and there have been a number of occasions where this trait has caused problems. Hell, you only have to look at Guantanamo, how many years behind is he on that? A strong leader who meant what he said would've trivially had that closed years ago.
FWIW I also believe this is why the NSA seems to be running the show, because Obama doesn't have the decisiveness to determine when to say no.
Obama and Putin have never gotten along. Obama went behind Putin's back shortly after coming to power and did deals with Medvedev after Putin had told him "no". Putin has never forgiven him.
Honestly it's like a playground, they're both children quite frankly.
""America" is not a person. Did you mean to say Obama?"...
"When Obama was elected"
Who do you think elected him? What country are those people the citizens of? That's why when people say America, they mean America. You elected him under your system of representation so you're responsible for him.
But what if it's a choice between leading by example or producing a device that's a viable competitor to the iPad Mini because alternate hardware options just aren't competitive?
There seems little point leading by example if there's no one to sell an uncompetitive device to and that's really the dilemma I guess because otherwise there's a danger that people will associate "open source" with "uncompetitive device" if the only open source devices on the market aren't competitive.
It's really the hardware manufacturer's faults for not supporting open source as a standard option for device manufacturers as it means the market for open source supporting hardware isn't as competitive and hence as efficient as the closed source hardware market due to less choice.
Problem is in reality if this ever actually happened then the chances are those left on Earth would over time naturally organise and form hierarchy anyway. One in which the space station dwellers would find themselves left out of, which would probably be bad news when the re-organised earth dwellers figure out once more how to fling things into space.
"Russia is a failed superpower, telling it's self what it wants to hear."
This is true but it's a failed superpower that still has the largest nuclear arsenal, one of the largest conventional military arsenals and one of the highest military expenditures in the world, and that makes it dangerous all the same.
"Java (and say Maven) makes it trivial to use third party libraries. A few minutes and Joda time is installed, seen by the IDE and properly distributed within any jars I make."
Maven is far from flawless. I had a number of versioning issues with it earlier this year (specifically it was caching old versions and not updating, causing compile failures) and it doesn't work well with proxy servers that require authentication for example. You also need to know what the name is of what you're looking for which can require additional Googling - it's certainly not intuitive. When it's working it's painless though I agree, but the point is it's still extra work and still an extra place where problems can arise and the longer that can be avoided by having decent core libraries the better. The benefit of.NET in this regard is simply that it's DateTime handling methods are excellent enough to not require you to go fishing for third party solutions.
"I guess C# users are forced to deal with only the built in libraries"
Don't be silly, you just right click, click add reference, and select the reference if you already have a library to reference. As of 2012 though they have NuGet which does everything Maven does but with a built in package browser from a central repository with an exhaustive list of libraries (including FOSS libraries).
"Also if you want a good IDE for Java then you buy Intellij IDEA and call it a day."
I agree it's very good (about a thousand fold better than Eclipse for example), but Visual Studio certainly still has the edge.
I work on C#, Java and C++ projects FWIW so I do have the benefit of experience with all three in quite some detail.
I made this mistake a long time ago but most people rapidly see through the marketing once they've signed up and recognise the horrendous performance they get as a result and then go elsewhere where they get real actual quality. Sure they may have caps but at least they know what they're getting. Unlimited hosting and file transfer is useless if the transfer speeds are prohibitive and it's better to have 100gb of transfer at a guaranteed speed of 100mbps than it is to have unlimited transfer at only a few kbps.
I don't think any authority would take it to that extreme as that would also mean business were banned from using VPN etc. Effectively you'd rapidly find that your entire nation's industry and people are the world's easiest target for corporate espionage as everything is sent in the clear and your economy collapses as a result.
I was amused to see the BBC comment at the end of the article that because Chinese and Brazilian meat production seemed to have plateaued that this was a solution in search of a problem.
It's as if they're entirely unaware that even if they have plateaued there are still major benefits to producing meats with decreased healthcare concerns (we can avoid things like CJD and TB in lab meat), decreased emissions, decreased destruction habitat for meat production.
This is an important thing even if the human race stopped growing today, even if it reversed somewhat.
This doesn't surprise me. In the last decade we've had numerous stories of people's houses being raided or arrested or charged because of something they've said on Twitter and it's always made me a bit suspicious that these people got caught given they had only a handful of followers they knew closely.
Take the Doncaster airport guy in the UK who made a joke about blowing it up if the delays weren't sorted in 7 days or whatever - the chance of one of those few tens of people he had following him taking it seriously and reporting it to the police is probably about zero. In reality I suspect an NSA/GCHQ automated monitoring program picked it up and forwarded it to the police as a threat. The same goes for people who have flown to the US only to be investigated by border security for jokes they've made on Twitter - that shit doesn't just coincidentally get stumbled across in the pool of billions of tweets, it's being monitored and reported to all these agencies automatically, presumably through "anonymous tip off" - aka an NSA/GCHQ computer.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW I don't think any option is a good idea, I think it's a case of choosing the least bad idea.
On one hand we can bomb Syria and hopefully send a message that the benefits of chemical weapons usage (clearing an area of people without damaging infrastructure) is outweighed by the cost of international response but with the risk that this will just make Assad go berserk and start firing into Jordan, Turkey and Israel.
On the other hand we have the option of doing nothing with the risk that chemical weapon usage is deemed acceptable so that even more is used. The problem with CW usage is that although it doesn't necessarily cause more casualties than conventional weapons it does remove the cost of having to rebuild after. It's dangerously effective for for example, ethnic cleansing, as you can hit an area with CW, wipe out the inhabitants and then just send in a new population a couple of weeks later to take all their stuff and live in their homes. Right now even if Assad wins the cost is high because he'll be destroying his major cities and his country will become poorer so at some point there's an incentive for him to not destroy everything in an effort to kill everyone, but with CWs? There's no incentive not to just kill absolutely everyone who opposes him and even those caught in the middle who don't. There's also a danger that other regimes then try the same approach on their populace.
It's all bad either way so although I'm leaning towards bombing Syria as the least bad option I think even in hindsight it'll look bad, but will it look as bad in hindsight as doing nothing would have if we'd done nothing instead? That's ultimately the question we have to ask.
Contrast this to other recent actions and I think Iraq is way worse in hindsight than doing nothing would've been in hindsight. I think Afghanistan however may be just a little bit better (even though it's still bad) in hindsight than leaving the Taliban in may have been - it's easy to forget how brutal that regime was when we focus only on the more recent fuckup of an invasion we made.
"And what is Turkey doing about that?"
It's called on NATO support which is kind of the point.
"What did the UN do about that?"
Nothing because it's politically paralysed.
"You're right - they can ask for our assistance. Which would imply that they are leading the charge and not us. Why is it our responsibility to lead the charge?"
I suspect you're tainted by your media, because your media reports on your governments actions making you believe it's just your government taking the lead. British media is prominent in reporting how it's the UK that's taken this to the UN for authorisation and I'm sure French media is reporting the steps France is taking. Turkish media will be doing the same. The arab league has similarly made it's comments and it's push. The lead on this is multinational in nature.
It's not as if you always lead the charge either, look at Libya, French warplanes with British following had to intervene to stop a massacre in Benghazi when Obama was still stuttering away with his pants down and no idea what to do or say. The same applies to Malia where the French took the lead.
I really wish you'd just stop lying and pretending I've said things I haven't. It's quite stupid, i.e.:
"As mentioned previously, this is intentioned as the US Media is painting them as innocent victims with no way of using Chemical weapons. You do the same, even to the point of claiming that they can't deliver CWs."
I haven't said they can't deliver CWs. It's quite obvious they're capable of delivering standard artillery and mortar rounds with a chemical payload. What I have said is there's no evidence that they're capable of delivering 1 and a half metre long munitions, let alone from the middle of government held territory. That's quite a contrast to what you're saying I've said.
"I do like however, that you dropped the UN findings in March from your argument because those facts hurt your belief that it must be Assad using CWs. How considerate of you to be so selective with facts."
Where have I dropped this exactly? I asked you to provide a source. You haven't done this, so should I assume you just made it up or are you going to actually provide evidence for your assertion? Asking someone to back up their claim with evidence isn't dropping something, it's asking them to prove their point, if you believe your point is correct the only logical conclusion I can make from you attempting to avoid proving it with a source is that you're simply lying.
"While this may be _YOUR_ opinion, this is not the opinion of US foreign policy or any recent administration."
Really? It's my opinion that nukes are deterrents and get EOL'd before use? Since World War II can you point to use of nuclear WMDs in a military conflict because I and the rest of the world would love to hear about it.
"We threaten Iran because they are trying to gain nuclear capabilities under the assumption that they will be nuking us and our allies."
That's because there's always a danger that just because current nuclear arsenals are a deterrent that not everyone will view them that way. It's not really rocket science to be able to understand this. The whole point in limiting nuclear arsenals is precisely to ensure they remain a deterrent and nothing else.
"Assad has not attacked UN forces, and the FSA has."
Yes he has, he's also fired artillery, mortar shells and bullets into Turkey killing Turkish civilians in their own homes. This is why I'm suspicious of your one-sidedness as you're either brutally uninformed on the issue or intentionally presenting a very biased case. This is also why I said it's irrelevant what the FSA has done outside the chemical issue because for every rebel wrongdoing you can point to many of the same type and on a larger scale carried out by the regime. It's pointless and irrelevant to the chemical question unless you're trying to poison the well.
"You do realize that the US has been monitoring every CW depot in Syria for over a year correct? So what you are claiming is twisted reasoning. There would, and should be, two parts to the inspection. 1) investigating the target area, and 2) investigating CW housing facilities for recent activity."
What makes you think this isn't the reason the US is certain Assad is responsible? Why are you assuming the US knows about every chemical facility? It's not like with Pakistan a US ally that shares all it's nuclear facility information with the US, Syria doesn't do that, the US knowledge of chemical facilities is based on intel and intel can be wrong and miss things.
"So killing thousands of civilians is the answer to someone killing a few hundred?"
I disagree but you seem to think so given that you're defending the Assad regime that has done exactly that which is a little odd. I don't even know what killing of thousands of civilians you're referring to. If there's any strike it should be against purely military targets, if there's any risk of this going wrong then the US shouldn't launch the strike. I don't agree with the US doctrine of fire now and worry about civilian casualties later, I prefer the Anglo-French
"Where is the evidence for that, other than FSA claims? UN inspectors say that they can't tell who launched it."
The Brown Moses blog has a decent write up on it:
http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/
He seems to be pretty reasoned and balanced in his reporting too which is a refreshing change.
"There's no special equipment necessary for this - it's just regular artillery shells with a different filling. Some of them can be launched from mortars, even. It's all really low tech."
The imaged munitions are just too large to be fired from a mortar, they're around 1 and a half metres in length at least, possibly 2, that's a sizeable round requiring a substantial artillery piece at minimum.
"Did rebels call out for a ceasefire?"
Is there any reason to think the rebels wouldn't want investigators in ASAP to validate their claims? Has Assad even suggested that was the reason the inspectors couldn't go in? Assad was completely silent on the issue and gave no such excuse, most likely because he knew the rebels would rapidly respond with such an offer of safe passage for the inspectors, because that's what the rebels were calling for.
"Assuming a "sniper" here means a guy with an SVD, he could be anywhere within 700 meters."
700 metres and still get multiple pot shots on the tyres and engine? Seems unlikely.
I don't disagree with you that there are multiple players involved all with different agendas and few agreeing, but that doesn't change the fact that Assad still seems the most likely culprit given the evidence available. The extremists would find it just as hard to get a massive artillery piece into government held territory and launch multiple such rounds unchallenged and undetected. It seems silly to suggest that Assad's forces doing this doesn't make sense - it doesn't make sense that Assad would allow his forces to fire into Turkey and risk getting a major military power that was a former ally to turn on him, it doesn't make sense that he'd attack peaceful protests just as the likes of Gaddafi did turning them from protestors into rebels. It didn't make sense for Japan to pull the US into World War II either but that's the problem with saying it doesn't make sense - any assumption that anything a dictatorial regime does should make sense is a false assumption. Dictators and those under them aren't rational and that's what makes them so dangerous.
I'm not calling for military action at least until the UN has time to play out it's game and even then it's questionable as to what action should be taken because it's so messy but I do think the evidence is pretty strongly tilted against Assad on this.
"The obvious reason to show this is to break the common illusion that the FSA are innocent victims in the use of chemical weapons."
But that's not the debate is it? Most people here are smart enough to know that neither side is the good guy, the debate is about whether action should occur to limit the impact of chemical weapons usage against civilians by the Assad regime. Other wrongdoing by either side is pretty much irrelevant to that. That's why your viewpoint comes across as one-sided, because you're painting the FSA as bad with all sorts of irrelevancies without giving the regime the same treatment before addressing the underlying issue - talk about poisoning the well.
"Email verification is not just a visual inspection of messages."
Right but those "experts" don't have access to anything else whatsoever other than the messages, and perhaps not even that - seemingly just screenshots of said messages. They don't have access to the mailservers and interim router logs so it's pointless to pretend they're doing anything other than just looking at message content.
Your comparison to Manning et. al. is hence irrelevant because the US military does have access to all their own logs.
"More rubbish! The UN reports are public knowledge."
Provide a source then as I've not seen anything to suggest such reports exist other than a news story from a Russian propaganda outlet that the Russians handed this information to the Americans at the UN which is not the same as the UN finding this independently.
"A logical step in obtaining a weapon is for it's later use."
Right, and that's why we have nukes, because we're going to actually use them? Most WMDs are EOL'd without ever being used as they're first and foremost a deterrent or bargaining chip.
"I think the question alone shows that you are extremely biased."
Oh stop being a fucking idiot. I never said anywhere it was okay for the US to assume one group is acquiring for use and another is not, you just completely fabricated that whole concept in your mind. It's quite possible for someone like me to think the US was in the wrong on Iraq but right in Syria - you may be inept at understanding the world is full of shades of grey but I'm perfectly capable of avoiding that world is only black/white kind of retardation people like you seem to suffer. It's quite possible for both the US and Assad to be in the wrong on some things, and right on other things you know? Because I believe Assad is almost certainly in the wrong here doesn't mean I somehow believe the US has always been in the right about everything ever. Hell, even though I think Assad is most likely in the wrong here, I'm still not even convinced the US is going about things the right way.
"Actually there are numerous reports and videos of the FSA using artillery based chemical weapons. Since those are not verifiable by credible sources I did not list them."
Not of the type that was used in this particular chemical strike. The Brown Moses blog has a reasonable write up and analysis of the munitions in question. Most rebel weaponry has been of the scale of your average artillery shell, the munitions in this case were something very different.
"There is no evidence that Assad shot at inspectors. Assad has no history of doing so, but the FSA on the other hand has. The FSA has also kidnapped UN peace keepers, targeted civilians (IED, public executions, etc...). To claim that this must have been Assad is almost laughable."
You're both speculating and going off on a wild tangent again - Assad's forces have also committed mass atrocities and kidnappings including summary executions of entire families and mass rape but what's the relevance here unless you're trying to taint the discussion. If the rebels fired at the UN convoy then why? The sooner the convoy can get there the sooner the rebels can try and have their claim validated, whilst Assad had already delayed the inspectors by about a week. The rebels have neither incentive nor reason to do anyt
Your post is an example of confirmation bias, you're only seeing what you want to see. The fact is the situation is far less straightforward than your post implies:
"2. December, FSA rebels posted Youtube videos of home made chemical agents killing rabbits."
Can't say I've ever heard about this but what exactly does it prove? Simply that some rebels were experimenting with chemical weapons along with all the other home made weapons they've created? Great, but it's no proof of usage in actual combat or even effectiveness of chemicals against humans.
"3. December, German hacker broke into a UK military contractors email and found messages stating roughly the US and UK are paying enormous funds for us to sneak CWs into Syria, use a CW shell from Libya of Russian make similar to what Assad would have, and blow it up. Experts have determined that the emails look to be legit."
I've encountered this before though afaik it was a Malaysian hacker not that it makes a difference either way. I don't think "experts" can determine anything much, an e-mail is so trivially possible to make look legit it's meaningless, all they can really say is that there were no mistakes made in making it look legit, but seeing as a simple checklist is enough to avoid that then I don't know that it matters. Even taking the assumption that it was legit then it's not a smoking gun because it provides no verifiable evidence that anything concrete ever came of it.
"4. February chemical weapons were claimed to be used. The UN determined in March that it was the FSA using these weapons. Interestingly, the US claims contrary to the UN without evidence. Of course the war drum banging was minimized by media, perhaps too close to the emails suggesting false flag?"
This particular comment is painfully one-sided. The UN didn't determine anything. Russia, Assad's close ally made the claim that they had irrefutable proof that the FSA had used chemical weapons in response to evidence provided by the US and others (including independent organisations such as human rights and medical charities) that the Syrian military had used chemical weapons. Effectively it was a he-said she-said, but most definitely wasn't the one-sided no-doubt about it FSA only used chemical weapons scenario you're claiming. At best if reports are all assumed to be true then both sides made small-scale usage of chemical weapons though the problem is the Russian evidence is least credible because it could only come from one source, the Assad regime itself, and was not backed by independent third party sources.
"5. March, Military.com reported that FSA rebels were caught attempting to transport chemical weapons through the Turkish border into Syria."
Again, quite possibly true and a big deal, but transport of weapons isn't equivalent to use of weapons. Just to highlight why this is the case then consider that the Assad regime has been in control of a stockpile of chemical weapons for decades and it's pretty clear that up until recently that demonstrates no evidence that they've used them. I guess at best your point is an attempt to build the case that they had access to them so they could potentially have used them.
"8/20 videos start being uploaded to Youtube showing victims of CWs. Date stamps put many of these videos ahead of the reported attack by at least 12 hours."
This has firmly been debunked as idiots getting confused by time zones:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/confused-by-how-youtube-assigns-dates-russians-cite-false-claim-on-syria-videos/?_r=0
Now contrast and compare this to the evidence for the latest chemical attack:
1) The munitions used in the attack were launched into the region from a firmly Syrian military held area
2) There is no evidence the rebels have access to any type of weaponry which can launch the type of munitions in question
I don't think so. Tunisia was different because it was an uprising that actually worked, in Iran it was suppressed. It was seeing an uprising work that triggered the same to happen in the other arab nations as it gave them hope that they could in fact overthrow the dictators in charge.
It's paranoia to say nothing in the world relating to the human environment happens by chance, it's too complex for those involved in politics to reasonably predict or plan for this sort of thing to happen. It's like the people who believe 9/11 was orchestrated by the NSA and the WTC was taken down by explosives - the NSA can't even keep it's own secrets secure so how the fuck would it manage thousands of people from those manning seismometers and getting them to lie about the non-detection of an explosion through to the thousands of security staff who would've seen someone wiring up explosives, through to the rescue workers all of whom would have to be in on the plot for it to be successful.
The idea that things of this scale are controllable in this manner is a joke, if we could predict and control complex systems like this then weather reports would be always accurate, financial markets would maintain perpetual unfaltering growth and perhaps more importantly, there would be no need for war. It's likely that agencies like the CIA stoke the flames in nations like Iran and help fund and support activists and so forth but it takes way more than that to trigger a successful uprising, let alone multiple successful uprisings across a massive region. That can't be planned and controlled.
It was entirely Bush's fuckup but the problem runs through the American mindset. America is far too good at blowing shit up, and not so great at building shit up - you can see this from their overall strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq through to the individual scale of multiple cases where American troops have killed civilians/allies through sheer negligence and the issue has resulted in no punishment.
It's fundamentally a problem of arrogance, a belief that America can do no wrong and ultimately the ugly side of the concept of American exceptionalism. I think you're dead right in that if you don't have a clear plan and clear objectives then you shouldn't go in but I disagree that you couldn't have done a better job. I think it was wrong to go into Iraq in the first place as there really was no genuine justification, but once you had gone in the biggest mistake the US made in failing to rebuild the state was to completely dismantle existing Iraqi institutions, the police and military were just completely disbanded and it took way too long to build up new ones allowing utter anarchy to occur in the meantime which just snowballed out of control as al Qaeda et. al. moved in and the likes of Sadr and friends grew in strength unopposed. The proper solution was to leave them in place and change them - replace the hard liners with moderates and retrain from the top down.
Afghanistan was a different matter, not enough was spent there after the invasion, the US tried to do it on the cheap and it backfired costing way more in the long run. At some points America was spending more in Iraq in a month than it had in about 5 years in Afghanistan. This meant reconstruction again too way too long and the Afghans that supported the invention got fed up of waiting, coupled with lack of care to avoid civilian casualties turned opinion against occupying troops.
I agree Syria is awkward, just like Egypt, and Libya. There's a legitimate question of whether what rises to replace Assad will in any way be better than Assad. Perhaps the best thing that could come out of it all is the destruction of Hezbollah though as it loses it's main financial backer, it's over-the-border arms supplier and a sizeable proportion of it's troops fighting in Syria. Hezbollah has tipped the balance in favour of Assad by joining in, so if a few arms-length cruise missile strikes tip the balance back then I guess it's about just letting them take chunks out of each other until the likes of Hezbollah and the al-Qaeda aligned groups have been battered into irrelevance by each other but what happens then is still anyone's guess.
"Do we punish every country for which a misdeed is perceived?"
No, just particularly defined atrocities.
"And which misdeeds are punishable and which are not?"
Those defined as "crimes against humanity", this category tends to encompass things like massacres, particularly when banned weapons such as chemical and biological. See here for more detail on the category:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity
"The US has not been attacked. Therefore we do not go to war. The US is not under threat of attack by Syria. Therefore we do not go to war."
Doesn't matter. Turkey has been hit by Syrian weaponry, Turkey is a NATO member, NATO members are obligated to help each other in the face of acts of war, just as Turkey helped you after your tragedy in Afghanistan, you owe it a debt of supporting it when it has faced aggression from Syria. If you don't like it, get out of NATO, but don't come crying if you find yourself not having the overwhelming military support of NATO in a stand off against China or whoever. The US has a large military but it's still small relative to the combined size of NATO forces.
"We did not enter WWII until two years later in 1941, and in that case our fucking military base at pearl harbor was attacked. Get a grip bro."
So you're saying it's better to do what you did then and let millions of foreign civilians die remaining passive until an atrocity is committed against your own civilians and then act losing millions more personnel in a far more complex and out of control war? Rather than act early, save the lives of millions of foreign civilians and prevent any attacks on your own civilians whilst losing less of your own servicemen precisely because you stamped out the problem early? What an odd preference. I'm not sure it's the GP that needs to get a grip.
I'm not much one for war myself (Iraq was stupid. Afghanistan not quite so much but was incredibly poorly executed meaning it ended up stupid) but the rationale being used here by people like yourself is nonsensical, it amounts to "We shouldn't get involved until the problem is so out of control it affects us and causes loss of life to us too". That really is fucking stupid.
"should we talk about the rebels carving out and eating organs again?"
Why do you say "rebels"? One or two rebels did this and you tar the other million or so with the same brush? Pretending they're all the same is stupid and even those who stood behind this guy as their leader when he did it are now shunning him. He has been interviewed as to why he did it and even his closest friends have suggested it wasn't the smartest idea when interviewed too. He wasn't some batshit crazy fundamentalist who eats hearts because of some voodoo belief it'll make him stronger or anything (as is the case with some African combatants over the last few decades), he was an individual in a brutal war trying to scare the living fucking shit out of the opposition with the video. That doesn't make it defensible but it's kind of worlds apart from killing as many as 1000 people, most of whom were civilians using chemical weapons like sarin gas.
"then you have my permission"
Oh well great good dictator, I'm glad then we'll have YOUR permission, because of course you're so god damn important.
"If they aren't attacking other countries"
They've killed Turkish civilians with stray bullets, mortar rounds, artillery shells, and bombs. Intentional or not, that's a clear act of war. They've also had their attack aircraft intrude into Turkish airspace and they've fired upon the Golan Heights which is a UN demilitarised buffer zone in breach of the UN convention that created it. Turkey is a NATO member and part of the NATO agreement is that member states can call on others to assist if they face acts of aggression. I'm not arguing for or against this intervention here but the US is very much implicated in this as a member of NATO just as NATO helped the US in it's war in Afghanistan. Turkey has suffered numerous acts of war from Syria so has every right to insist that the US and other NATO members assist it in striking Syria.
I'm not against your premise that this is a messy complex situation and that getting involved is fraught with risks as a result but your suggestion that this isn't your problem is completely false. You can't call on the help of NATO after your 9/11 tragedy as it suits and then shrug off your responsibilities as a NATO member as not your problem when it doesn't.
But the Cold War was supposedly over so picking a fight over Russia influence isn't the done thing anymore. If however you can pick a fight that gets the Russian's kicked out without making it directly about the Russians then great.
There's also another important geopolitical prize for the West here - the destruction of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is funded by Iran and Syria and has a massive percentage of it's forces in Syria. If Hezbollah loses half it's forces in Syria and Syria itself falls then Hezbollah is basically done, it becomes easy pickings for the anti-Hezbollah forces remaining in Lebanon and can be trivially put down by the Western backed secular Lebanese military. Effectively Lebanon becomes much more free from Syrian/Iranian influence and Israel gets a secure northern border.
There's a lot for the West to gain from all this, Russia loses it's last remaining naval base in the Med, Hezbollah becomes ineffective and loses it's funding and only immediate land path for arms to be passed to it, Lebanon falls almost entirely into the hands of the West and Syrian oil becomes up for grabs.
The West may not be there only because of Russia but it's bound to be one of a number of reasons that makes the West happy to be there.
You were well received in Iraq when you toppled Saddam and Afghanistan after you kicked out the Taliban. You just completely and utterly fucked it up after those points.
I don't know why Americans always point to the UK in an attempt to pretend their country hasn't grossly overstepped the mark. It's pretty clear the US does everything the UK does to its citizens and then some, the only difference being that in the UK it's talked about, reported on and normally debated in parliament but in the US the government just does it and pretend it doesn't. The US has far more local laws against liberty than the UK too such as mandating how much grass you must or musn't have in your own fucking garden and so forth which is stupid. Not to mention half of America's students study under the watch of armed guards half the time now too as a measure resulting from school shootings.
America as being more free than any European country including the UK now is a pretty well established fallacy. These a massive gulf between the freedom Americans think they have and stand for than they actually have and stand for. In contrast the UK knows about the limitations on freedom it suffers but just because it acknowledges them more than America doesn't mean it suffers them more in practice. The UK still allows firearms such as shotguns and hunting rifles with hundreds of thousands still out there (8% of the population opt to own a firearm) whilst America bans kinder eggs. What was that about nanny state?
America needs to wake up and smell the coffee and still trying to use misdirection against other states. About the only additional freedoms Americans have and can point to are the ability to picket funerals shouting "God hates fags" and the ability to own greater firearms that they supposedly need to defend their liberty. Great ideas but how are they working out in practice? Not at all it seems.
The UK may have issues but it at least is a step further on in the process in dealing with them in that they're acknowledged. America is still stuck very much in the denial stage with no sign of breaking out saying it doesn't need to because well, apparently Britain is worse. Apparently.
Yep, a lot of people have a very draconian view that a leader or manager is someone who commands down their views and slaps their underlings into submission.
But a good leader or manager recognises they're there not to command, but to enable their staff to do their jobs. Rarely that might mean giving them a kick up the arse, but mostly being a good leader is about being knowledgeable or knowing where to find knowledge (be it the internet, a training course, or a book) to assist staff who get stuck.
A good leader doesn't need to be nasty or forceful because they have earnt the respect of their staff and in earning the respect of their staff their staff will be happy to do as they ask or know that they can query and discuss any problems they may encounter or have with what is asked. As you say, they know it's not just what the leader says that goes, but about consensus.
And being a good leader is good in itself because you don't have to get annoyed, you don't have to get stressed, you can turn up to work and just peacefully get on with your job because you know your staff will get on with theirs. Shit gets done, targets get hit and bonuses get paid.
Do you live on a different planet or something?
"We helped push Mubarak out when it became obvious that he was going to go"
No you didn't, the people of Egypt and their military did. At best America issued a few "strongly worded statements".
"We not only militarily forced Quadaffi out, but we managed to arrange things so that everyone else was *begging* us to do it, so we could come in "reluctantly""
France had launched it's first strikes against Gaddaffi's forces when Obama and Hillary were still fumbling about with indecisiveness as the people of Benghazi were otherwise only hours away from carnage.
You barely even helped. Apart from some initial cruise missiles and some drones in the sky providing surveillance it was an Anglo-French-Qatari affair as it was they who were doing all the bombing runs and all of the rest of the surveillance as well as providing all the on the ground training and delivery of weapons. Of course, the people who really did the bulk of the work though were the rebels themselves though.
"You tell me what else changed in the last 8 months to cause this? "
So there you have it, nothing has changed and that's the point. This is Obama's modus-operandi. The press and other leaders call it "patient and considered" but in reality he's indecisive and fumbling. There are any numbers of occasions where if he was a strong leader he'd have been more decisive and stood up for his point but instead just stayed quiet - the battles in Syria have been going on over 2 years and he still doesn't know what he's doing and the worst part? He finally decided to arm the rebels only after the extremist groups had gained loads of power because no one else was coming to help. Had he decided to arm the rebels a year or 18 months ago then the moderates would've been in a far stronger position than they are now. His fumbling only made the situation worse - he should've armed early, or made a commitment not to intervene full stop. He did neither and created a shit storm as he did nothing about chemical weapon attacks something he previously called a "red line" - we know one thing, Obama's red-lines are probably the least scary thing on the planet.
I'm not a fan of the other extreme - the Bush-Cheney hot-headed kill everything ideology but dawdling about without making a decision is entirely about Obama not Kerry or Clinton and there have been a number of occasions where this trait has caused problems. Hell, you only have to look at Guantanamo, how many years behind is he on that? A strong leader who meant what he said would've trivially had that closed years ago.
FWIW I also believe this is why the NSA seems to be running the show, because Obama doesn't have the decisiveness to determine when to say no.
Obama and Putin have never gotten along. Obama went behind Putin's back shortly after coming to power and did deals with Medvedev after Putin had told him "no". Putin has never forgiven him.
Honestly it's like a playground, they're both children quite frankly.
""America" is not a person. Did you mean to say Obama?" ...
"When Obama was elected"
Who do you think elected him? What country are those people the citizens of? That's why when people say America, they mean America. You elected him under your system of representation so you're responsible for him.
But what if it's a choice between leading by example or producing a device that's a viable competitor to the iPad Mini because alternate hardware options just aren't competitive?
There seems little point leading by example if there's no one to sell an uncompetitive device to and that's really the dilemma I guess because otherwise there's a danger that people will associate "open source" with "uncompetitive device" if the only open source devices on the market aren't competitive.
It's really the hardware manufacturer's faults for not supporting open source as a standard option for device manufacturers as it means the market for open source supporting hardware isn't as competitive and hence as efficient as the closed source hardware market due to less choice.
Problem is in reality if this ever actually happened then the chances are those left on Earth would over time naturally organise and form hierarchy anyway. One in which the space station dwellers would find themselves left out of, which would probably be bad news when the re-organised earth dwellers figure out once more how to fling things into space.
"Russia is a failed superpower, telling it's self what it wants to hear."
This is true but it's a failed superpower that still has the largest nuclear arsenal, one of the largest conventional military arsenals and one of the highest military expenditures in the world, and that makes it dangerous all the same.
"Java (and say Maven) makes it trivial to use third party libraries. A few minutes and Joda time is installed, seen by the IDE and properly distributed within any jars I make."
Maven is far from flawless. I had a number of versioning issues with it earlier this year (specifically it was caching old versions and not updating, causing compile failures) and it doesn't work well with proxy servers that require authentication for example. You also need to know what the name is of what you're looking for which can require additional Googling - it's certainly not intuitive. When it's working it's painless though I agree, but the point is it's still extra work and still an extra place where problems can arise and the longer that can be avoided by having decent core libraries the better. The benefit of .NET in this regard is simply that it's DateTime handling methods are excellent enough to not require you to go fishing for third party solutions.
"I guess C# users are forced to deal with only the built in libraries"
Don't be silly, you just right click, click add reference, and select the reference if you already have a library to reference. As of 2012 though they have NuGet which does everything Maven does but with a built in package browser from a central repository with an exhaustive list of libraries (including FOSS libraries).
"Also if you want a good IDE for Java then you buy Intellij IDEA and call it a day."
I agree it's very good (about a thousand fold better than Eclipse for example), but Visual Studio certainly still has the edge.
I work on C#, Java and C++ projects FWIW so I do have the benefit of experience with all three in quite some detail.
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I made this mistake a long time ago but most people rapidly see through the marketing once they've signed up and recognise the horrendous performance they get as a result and then go elsewhere where they get real actual quality. Sure they may have caps but at least they know what they're getting. Unlimited hosting and file transfer is useless if the transfer speeds are prohibitive and it's better to have 100gb of transfer at a guaranteed speed of 100mbps than it is to have unlimited transfer at only a few kbps.
I don't think any authority would take it to that extreme as that would also mean business were banned from using VPN etc. Effectively you'd rapidly find that your entire nation's industry and people are the world's easiest target for corporate espionage as everything is sent in the clear and your economy collapses as a result.
I was amused to see the BBC comment at the end of the article that because Chinese and Brazilian meat production seemed to have plateaued that this was a solution in search of a problem.
It's as if they're entirely unaware that even if they have plateaued there are still major benefits to producing meats with decreased healthcare concerns (we can avoid things like CJD and TB in lab meat), decreased emissions, decreased destruction habitat for meat production.
This is an important thing even if the human race stopped growing today, even if it reversed somewhat.
This doesn't surprise me. In the last decade we've had numerous stories of people's houses being raided or arrested or charged because of something they've said on Twitter and it's always made me a bit suspicious that these people got caught given they had only a handful of followers they knew closely.
Take the Doncaster airport guy in the UK who made a joke about blowing it up if the delays weren't sorted in 7 days or whatever - the chance of one of those few tens of people he had following him taking it seriously and reporting it to the police is probably about zero. In reality I suspect an NSA/GCHQ automated monitoring program picked it up and forwarded it to the police as a threat. The same goes for people who have flown to the US only to be investigated by border security for jokes they've made on Twitter - that shit doesn't just coincidentally get stumbled across in the pool of billions of tweets, it's being monitored and reported to all these agencies automatically, presumably through "anonymous tip off" - aka an NSA/GCHQ computer.